Apr 26, 2024

Before we know it, summer will be here! While we’re looking forward to sunshine, warm weather, and fun days at the beach, do you know what’s better and will be here sooner? OpTech 2024! As the premier technology event of the year, it’s been curated to level up your supply chain game. At Heartland, we truly could not be more excited for such an incredible event. And trust us, you should be excited too!

OpTech 2024 will provide valuable opportunities to navigate through the countless innovations being made in supply chain modernization efforts. You will also get to network with many like-minded, business-driven professionals while discovering and learning about the cutting-edge technologies that are being pushed to elevate the operational excellence and supply chain efficiency of companies from all over. Wondering what else you can expect from OpTech 2024? There will be thorough presentations that breakdown all of the up-and-coming technologies and trends within the supply chain, along with exuberant vendor showcases that will help you collaborate and connect with experts in the supply chain. We will have a host of fascinating presentation topics addressing lessons from 2023’s supply chain, AI in demand forecasting, sustainability, private LTE connectivity for enhanced communication, predictive analytics for risk management, and much more.

We are proud to partner with our insightful event sponsors, many of whom will have space at and throughout the event. With all of that in mind, we would like to spotlight one of our sponsors—Data41—to provide more information about who they are and what they do.

• Who is Data41? – As a data analytics company that was founded in 2006, Data41’s heritage is in providing line of business solutions for the office of finance. They essentially help automate the financial planning and analysis functions within the office of the CFO—including things like budgeting, planning, forecasting, and scenario analysis. Their business analytics solutions are very outcome-based and measurable. That’s how they got their start as a value added reseller of a platform-based solution. As they’ve grown since 2006 to present day, the marketplace has changed and their offerings have expanded, but their core competencies have remained the same. Their offerings now extend into other areas such as operational analytics, sales analysis, and customer retention analytics. It was a natural transition from financial planning and analysis (FP&A) to extended planning and analysis (xP&A) to be able to accommodate the entire enterprise. Data41 has also added sustainability reporting to their repertoire as it goes hand-in-hand with xP&A. It is just another data source that perfectly fits in with operational planning. Artificial intelligence (AI) has also been layered on top of their solutions because it permeates every part of the business. According to Data41, AI is a big component of what they do now, especially with the growing opportunities that surround AI. When talking about AI, Data41 is referring to both machine learning (ML) and Generative AI.
  
  
• How does Data41 leverage AI technologies to extract insights from data and drive value for its clients? – This process, according to Data41, is extremely collaborative—it involves their team as well as their clients and experts within their respective businesses. With their long-standing clients, Data41 possesses a better perspective of what that client is trying to achieve as well as the direction they’re going through collaborative quarterly business reviews and other forms of engagements. For new clients, Data41 works tirelessly to learn their unique business processes. Data41’s approach is to map “the supply chain of data” to navigate the importance of specific pieces of data, as well as who has responsibility for it and what use it can bring. With each consumer having different perspectives on what data is necessary, when it is needed, and what can be done with it, Data41 leverages powerful AI—Generative AI, to be specific. They identify the many opportunities within companies by examining areas heavy in manual and technical effort and redundant tasks. Then they automate those processes to streamline the workflow and make them more efficient. These AI models are continually learning and eliminating manual processes by extracting vast amounts of information, categorizing them, and providing summaries of them to the client so that they can utilize the information in its purest form to make the greatest impact on the business. This information can then be used to expedite the decision-making process and compress decision cycle times more effectively.
  
  
  

At Heartland, we are proud to provide our customers with scalable and sustainable solutions that optimize their levels of efficiency, productivity, sustainability, and profitability. If we or Data41 sound like we can offer something beneficial to you and your operations, make sure to register for OpTech 2024 to check out more hot-topic content from industry pioneers.